The Euro.
Whence it came, where it goes

The euro was expected to catalyse 'ever deeper union' among its member states. Instead, the euro has been captured by bad financial habits of old and has put the euro north and south in fierce neonationalist confrontation. During the 2010s, the currency union was at a crossroads between either getting stuck in the mud of an ever deeper debt and joint-liability community bound to continual decline, or a reset of the euro and realignment of the Eurosystem based on a return to the no-bailout rule, national responsibility for national debt, and a number of rule changes in the Eurosystem (TARGET payment balances, voting rights).
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Monetary Reform and the Euro

Quite some people are wondering whether monetary reform can be implemented within the eurosystem, or whether the euro is an impediment to monetary reform; or whether individual countries could go it alone, or would have to leave the euro for being able to do so; or whether sovereign digital euros could be issued even within the eurosystem? As usual, the situation within the EU and the eurosystem is rather patchy.
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Is the euro a sovereign currency at all?

The monetary status of the euro may not be as clear as it seems at first glance. Here is a brief paper on
Does the euro qualifies as a sovereign currency? >

Greece, Italy and the euro. Exit or parallel domestic currency?

Since the height of the euro crisis and particularly the Greek debt crisis, there has was a discussion on parallel domestic currencies. For example, in 2018/19 the Italian government considered to introduce mini-bots (bot = buoni ordinari del tesoro), that is, treasury-issued bills in paper form or electronically, to be used like cash. Similar practices were widespread in the British American colonies, the later USA, in the 18th century (Colonial bills) and also in several European countries until around 1900.

**This is how Mini-Bots would look like. They would be denominated in Euro, not Lira!**

• Michele Paolo: A brief explainer of mini-bots, Italy’s parallel currency, Italics Magazine, 5 July 2019.

• How Italy’s mini-BOT ‘parallel currency’ would work, Reuters, 25 May 2019.

• Gerald Holtham, Cardiff Metropolitan University, thinks Reinforcing the Euro with national units of accounts, might be a remedy to the euro’s internal disparities (RWER issue no. 91, March 2020, 102-107). Basically this is another variant of a split national currency, one for external transactions (the EMU euro), the parallel one for domestic purposes (the national euro unit of account). Might it not be better to give the latter a name of its own?

> A Parallel Currency for Greece by Thomas Mayer, former chief economist of Deutsche Bank, financial columnist of Frankfurter Allgemeine, and founding director of Flossbach von Storch Research Institute.
The author has added a new idea which involves the separation of the banking sector into a 'good bank' half and 'bad bank' half > The Euro as a Foreign Currency for Greece, CEPS Commentary, 19 June 2015

Trond Andresen, from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, has developed the concept of an Electronic Parallel Money (EPM) > Initiating a parallel electronic currency in a eurocrisis country. Why it would work, real-world economics, issue no. 89, Oct 2019, 23-31.
An earlier parallel-currency proposal by Trond Andresen together with Robert W Parenteau from the Institute for New Economic Thinking is > A detailed program proposal for creating a parallel currency in Greece, Real World Economics Review Blog, 28 March 2015.
For a discussion of the latter also see Alan Harvey in the > IDEA newsletter INSIDE the reform of economics, vol 2, no 8, 22 April 2015.

As it happens when things are in the air, the above idea was developed independently a couple of years earlier by Ernst Dorfner as the concept of > Taxos.

Steve Keen suggests to transform the euro into a > European Bancor (Special Drawing Rights) similar to Keynes' Bretton Woods plan for an international currency architecture.

Parallel Currency in Scotland

• Duncan McCann and Josh Ryan-Collins on the > ScotPound, a new digital currency for Scotland, New Economics Foundation, London

on the european debt crisis

• Richard A. Werner > How to End the European Financial Crisis at no further cost and without the need for further political changes, University of Southhampton, CBFSD Policy Discussion Paper No. 3-12.

• Outright Confiscation: Plans for Depositor Bail-In exist in many countries, not just Cyprus. Ellen Brown on Truthout, 27 March 2013.

• A Plan for Euro Area Sovereign Debt Redemption & Banking Reform. Open Letter to the Ministers of Finance for the Euro Area, by Michael Schemmann (International Institute of Certified Public Accountants), June 2012.

• Thomas I. Palley: Euro lacks a government banker, Financial Times, 9 Dec 2011.